stealth_nsk
Deity
Yeah, and just a reminder, it's not necessary losing players, if players spend less time in the game, the numbers drop in the same way. And it's totally normal for players to spend less time on a game months after release.
Smegger213
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Really?
Civ 7's player count has fallen off a cliff.
DefinitelyNotSidMeier
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That's true. 7,000 average players can mean different things for different games too. It doesn't necessarily represent unique players.
DefinitelyNotSidMeier
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Compare it to other games and you will see it's normal.
Isn't there quite a massive gap between "rosy" and "terrible", though?
Isn't that how multiplayer works by default? Players take simultaneous turns? That's how it was in previous games, anyway. I haven't played any VII multiplayer.
Normal to what ? .
A we’ll overpriced unfinished unliked game getting 20% o player numbers of previous incarnations, ain’t “normal” .
Leucarum
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I guess that the word Rosy entered my head as a bit of a Freudian Slip on Rose-Tinted glasses. It could absolutely be worse, but trying to paint things in a good light seems like a stretch.
stealth_nsk
Deity
I'm always to that they barely paint any picture at all.
I mean seriously, to discuss the good and bad, you need first to define that exactly you're measuring. What exactly you're going to take comparing current number of simultaneous players in Civ6 and Civ7? And which results would be "good"?
I understand that people try to clang to the only metric they could easy get (and Steam gives it out for free exactly because of it's commercial uselessness), but from data analytics standpoint it looks something like "this car's top speed is 200km/h, while average pigeon weight is 400g; 200 is twice lower than 400, so the car is bad"
No, this is a gross mischaracterization of your rhetoric over the past several months. Any time there is something that can minutely be viewed as positive for the state of the game, you twist it that direction. On the other hand, when there is a mountain of evidence that is negative for the game, you downplay it, move the goalposts, or dismiss it entirely.
Leucarum
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Player numbers are correlated with a game's performance (unless you're dealing with a pay2win mobile game trying to hook in a small nunber of whales, but despite hyperbole, Civ7 isn't that). So I don't buy that argument.
The true doom-level is related to Firaxis' costs which we just don't know, but there'a a lot of mental gymnastics needed to make the player counts into a positive thing.
Well, this has two sides as well: cost and earnings. And our info about sales is also quite fuzzy. There are estimates for Steam, but these have a huge error margin.
For completeness sake: I didn‘t intend to call absolute player numbers „good“. Simply that after four months of steep decline (which was expected regardless of how good the game turned out), concurrent player numbers seemed to stabilize in the last three months. Relatedly, the number of active players on playtracker also seemed to stabilize between 110 and 130k on Steam. Which seems to be around 10% of the owners, if we believe the very rough estimates. I‘m sorry I forgot to put the usual „interpret these numbers as you like“
Leucarum
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I'd agree that the game seems to have found its floor. It's more a question of how bad is the floor?
Provocative question: how important is that? The related fear is that if there aren’t enough players/buyers, support is stopped, right? But for the moment, there seems to be support in hope of the long tail anyway. It‘s probably important nonetheless, but if the numbers improve over time, the floor isn’t that important, while if numbers start declining again, this first floor also wasn‘t important?
Leucarum
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Yup. It's a proxy for how many players the game is resonating with.
It's also the case that Firaxis have gone a long way to fixing issues like UI, Maps etc... And yet the game seems to barely be budging above its floor. It suggests Firaxis have yet to hit the magical change which would win people back, and they are running out of easy wins...
At some point the game will end activity if they can't improve things. And I do want to see Civ7 improve. I am not in the "burn it down and start agaim from scratch" faction. Civ7 made enough good changes that I struggle to play Civ6 now.
stealth_nsk
Deity
- Simultaneous player number depends on active player numbers and time they spent in game (which depends on many factors - gameplay, how old the audience is, competition landscape, etc.).
- Active players number is a current number of buyers multiplicated by the current active user percentage (which is quite weird metric actually, because any marketing person would operate with one of 2 types of retention instead).
- Number of current buyer is part of the total buyers, but with only half a year of data, projecting one to the other is very weak.
- Total number of buyers correlates to total money gains through average amount paid by each buyer, including DLCs and expansions. Again, without any expansions released and only first DLC packs, we have nearly zero information.
- Now to estimate the game success we need to compare those money gains to the money spent, another metric we have little knowledge about
So is there any correlation between current number of active players and the potential game success at any moment? Yes it is, but it's so weak that you'll never be able to find it mathematically. And speaking about math, a simple exercise - throughout first half a year of Civ7 we've seen number of simultaneous players changing for more than 10x. Which of the numbers should be used in your hypothetical correlation formula and why?
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But I was speaking in particular about comparing current concurrent player number of CIv7 with the same number of Civ6, which has no sense at all. You may try comparing more or less similar metrics and somehow assume all the outside factors are similar. But here people compare number of simultaneous players for a game which is on the market for 9 year with huge discounts and have much more owners with a game, which is on market for half a year and have much smaller number of owners, but hypothetically could have higher percentage of active players. If you don't know those parameters, those metrics are just incomparable.
P.S. As I said, Civ6 required 2 years to reliably overcome Civ5 in simultaneous number of active players, which means civ games are very slow in losing active players. You could see it on this forum with some people still playing Civ4 or even earlier games. But again, we have no reliable info on these numbers.
DefinitelyNotSidMeier
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Normal compared to other games. I can tell you heavily dislike Civ VII. It's also normal for the newest Civ game to have less players than its predecessor(s). VI had less players than V (and possibly IV) for a long time, V likely had less players than IV for a while too.
This is a meaningless distinction. "True" RTS are never truly real-time either and at least internally will have something like ticks (although they may go through great lengths to hide that)
DefinitelyNotSidMeier
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Not really? The main points which are said to say that the player count is bad are
1. It has less players than VI & V. Counter: VI had less players than V for a long time and possibly less than IV for a period. V likely had less players than IV for a period of time too.
2. Player retention is bad. Counter: Compare it to other games and you will see that player retention for VII is better than most, and isn't far off how VI was doing at the same point in its life cycle.
3. It has lost 80% of its players. Counter: This is normal for basically every game. VI sold 2 million copies in 2 weeks and peaked at over 160,000 players and then was getting peaks lower than 20k within 6 months. It's normal.
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